Anatomy of a Critic

In defense of an expert’s opinion. Or, has social media lost the plot?

Hello and welcome to this month’s free newsletter, an essay that I’ve been drafting — in my head, in my Notes app, in various Word docs — ever since I left Michelin. I wrote a version of this in 2021 for Resy (shout out to my editor Jon for helping me shape these early thoughts), but I wasn’t on TikTok then and, as we continue to shake off the pandemic, things have really escalated in the last three years.

There is a lot of discussion online right now about Substack and algorithms and questionable taste making, and I think there’s an equally important conversation to be had about this in the world of restaurant criticism. This essay is part one of a two-part attempt to broach the topic. Next time, I’ll take you behind the scenes of my review process.

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Sometime last fall, I was sitting in the backyard patio of a bakery in Brooklyn trying to figure out if it was worth writing about. As I was contemplating the oil temperature of a slightly too-oily donut, a recognizable TikTok influencer walked into the patio, sat at a nearby table, and proceeded to unpack his filming gear. It wasn’t much, just a short tripod with a camera angled for the perfect view of his face. I watched as he took a hearty bite of a breakfast sandwich and chewed with exaggerated expressions.

At that moment, I think I texted a friend something like, “well, this is my life now,” with an air of defeat. It’s not that I meant to disparage the influencer. That’s not what this essay is about. But to the naked eye, or to the scrolling eye, this influencer and I are in the same line of work. We occupy the same amount of space online. Materially, the internet flattens our content so that it is all received as one constant stream of information, sorted mainly by likes and engagement.

I’m sure my peers working for traditional media outlets would cringe at the idea of being leveled to a social media personality. They might dismiss the entire phenomenon of online restaurant reviews as shallow and amateur. Dubiously ethical, even. But it’s easy to look down when you’re sitting at the top of a legacy publication. I don’t have the luxury of an established media brand’s platform, so I’ve been thinking a lot about things like information, agency, authority — and how the internet has upended it all.

I’ve spent the last five years reconciling my pre-motherhood identity of having one of the most prestigious careers in restaurant criticism with the most humbling career pivot of breaking into food media as a freelancer. In this time, I’ve seen the field expand with social media and independent publishing while also contracting around the old, legacy guard. Maybe the two are related?

In any case, the most consequential change in this niche, in my opinion, is the greater accessibility of becoming a so-called taste maker and the promise or reward of making it big. It’s no longer enough to just watch and be entertained by the Bon Appétit test kitchen, but to try and replicate the success of its marquee stars through TikTok, Substack, and other means of production. Previously, you had to pass an interview and secure a coveted staff position to gain access to that kind of clout. Now you can just post your content online and hope that the algorithm will be kind.

Food has carried us into the vortex of cool. There, the urge to become part of the story is stronger than the duty to detach and observe and report the story.

Molly O'Neill, CJR

More than clout, the byproduct of an influencer going viral is a shot at creating a following. An audience can be monetized, which in a best-case scenario, could turn into some kind of financial independence. Ideologically, it’s an opportunity to be an entrepreneur and isn’t that just a more socially acceptable way of saying you don’t need to bother with anyone’s bullshit but your own?

Growing up outside of America, I watched reality TV shows like American Idol and The Apprentice (ugh) that basically said the country is full of diamonds in the rough and the next superstar could be anyone. More importantly, it could be you. We’re seeing an evolution, an explosion, of that main character energy as people on social media clamor for their slice of the proverbial pie (bag, whatever you want to call it) via affiliate links, sponsored content, and the creator fund.

Source: https://memebase.cheezburger.com/tag/library

It helps, then, that as far as a younger online audience is concerned, there is apparently no such thing as authority anymore. In a recent New Yorker article, Joshua Rothman writes about information determinism and how, online, any attempt at using expertise as a means of authority is immediately grounds for distrust. “Internet users, for their part, grew increasingly uninterested in taking leaders, institutions, and experts seriously,” he says. That makes sense to me when I see an influencer go viral with a verdict of “meh” for a restaurant most institutionalized critics loved.

What carries more weight now is the nature of the content — and whether or not it’s agreeable. In other words, we pay attention to specific restaurants and the people who promote them because we are attracted to their content. Either an influencer embodies our aspirations, captivates us with spectacle, or acts as some kind of mirror, a reflection of our tastes and aesthetics.

Like those starter pack memes, the last restaurant you dined at says a lot about who you are.

Over the past two decades, restaurants were more than simply a growing industry; for many they became a totem, a lodestar of in-group identification, a shorthand for cultural savvy and openness to experience. The person who frequented the right restaurants was living their best life. The restaurant agnostic was a cultural heathen left behind by the great hungry tide of progress.

Aaron Timms, n+1

At the same time, the demand for food-related content is steadily growing, and has been since the Food Network broadcast its first show in 1993. You could attribute the latest uptick to a post-pandemic era of “revenge living,” which is like revenge travel in that people are making up for those lost Covid years by splurging on experiences like dining out. Or the fact that it’s not much of a flex to buy so many things these days, and who among us can afford to buy a home right now, but everyone has to eat, right? Or maybe it’s because restaurant culture has evolved into pop culture, a virtually consumable lifestyle, totally disconnected from the actual act of eating.

Whatever the reason, the demand for food-as-content is arguably at its peak. The willingness of supply in the form of creators offering up opinions in exchange for influence is also at its peak. As a result, production and consumption of food media have merged to create a massive engine of content that is unwieldly, unmoderated, and in my opinion, largely unreliable.

Just to be clear, platforms like TikTok and Substack have put the means of production into a greater share of hands and I don’t think this alone is a bad thing. Like the invention of the printing press, these technologies have led to a democratization of information and opinions. Does it dilute the overall level of quality? Sure. But I’m not in a position to gatekeep so I can only defend my existence as a critic in this era of big data. To justify the absurd amount of time I spend putting this newsletter together. To advocate for qualities like impartiality and — not to lose the coconut tree — context.

In a restaurant review or recommendation, objectivity is important because there is an intent to be informed and fair. In art, this is known as disinterested taste, or the idea that a work is good in the context of all art and not just because a critic likes it. We lose some of this when we cede our thinking to influencers looking for virality or fame or whatever else it is they’re looking for. Influencers who might intentionally blur the lines between service and promotion (for the restaurant in question or, per above, the self).

Admittedly, objectivity is a slippery slope argument because biases are hard to get around and have, in food, for a long time favored Western Europe. Just because we think a critic is fair, doesn’t mean they actually will be, whether that’s intentional or not. I think this is what Soleil Ho was getting at in their 2019 review of Le Colonial for the San Francisco Chronicle: “I’m dismantling objectivity. Objectivity is a privileged white male old money perspective.”

Still, I do think many of the people who write about food or critique restaurants have made progress against these internalized biases over the last decade, even if the institutions they work for have not. They have evolved the definitions of good beyond whiteness, French-ness, and expensiveness.¹ Maybe the demographics of the people writing the stories have changed, maybe the readership demands something more inquisitive, but restaurant coverage is certainly more open and curious and earnest than it was when I first started out in this industry a decade ago.

In any case, since it’s impossible to separate ourselves from our opinions, and we’re simply drowning in opinions these days, maybe we should be after a different sort of objectivity. Rather than expecting disinterest, we are talking about food after all, we should instead ask what are the objectives of any given opinion. What is the agenda or motivation? Has it been disclosed? Where is the credibility? It’s media literacy, restaurant edition.

In his book On Criticism, the philosopher Noël Carroll defined criticism as an evaluation grounded in reason, which I think also works the other way around, as reason grounded in evaluation. In this semantic flip, the emphasis is on the evaluation, or as I would interpret it, study. The critics I know go to great lengths to think about food, well, critically. There’s so much rigor in the work – multiple visits, anonymity, comparative research, even international travel.

The resulting critiques, then, are grounded in a vast amount of research and study. Our verdicts are written to contextualize the food beyond “I liked it.”

People may disagree with the motivation of Michelin (that is, valorizing fine dining), but there is undeniable credibility in their methodology. The company did its best to codify an extremely subjective experience through a list of criteria and other inspector observations. There were endless forums of discussion where we could hash out our opinions, which we derived independently, free of any obligation to a chef or PR company. When I worked there, the company invested so much money in sending us out to eat, learn, and assess. The job totally consumed us.

As far as cuisine is concerned, one must read everything, see everything, hear everything, try everything, observe everything in order to retain in the end just a little bit.

Fernand Point, Ma Gastronomie

On the other hand, I’ve found that a lot of restaurant-focused social media accounts are fans with a day job. It helps to earn a real paycheck to fund a hobby of eating out in New York City, but the coverage starts to feel like rote documentation. It’s diaristic and, to take Carroll’s definition to heart, totally uncritical. As former restaurant critic Liz Cook recently wrote, a lot of restaurant coverage on Instagram is just “peppy boosterism.” I too have yet to find an influencer who provides real meaningful feedback in the form of a critique. An infinite list is meaningless; you can’t actually like everything.

To be fair, influencers are generally not trying to engage with restaurants in the same way a critic would. Most are probably just trying to generate enough content in order to post something every day, which seems to be the most commonly dispensed advice for growing an audience. Influencers earn authority through their follower counts, not their substantive knowledge. They are in the business of entertainment, or pleasing the gratuitous cheese-pull and hot take-hungry whims of the algorithm.

But as a result, the “best thing I ate” lists circulating online tend to look very similar. Opening coverage is dubiously hawked as an endorsement while posting for likes just inflates outlandish, iconoclastic takes. Sometimes, it’s all just a regurgitation of someone else’s work, with better lighting.

Restaurants, for their part, are in the business of staying in business. If influencers have become a new and necessary part of a restaurant’s marketing strategy, how much can we really trust what we see?

Which brings me to the question of taste. Does it even matter anymore if food tastes good or bad? To me, a critic, the answer is yes, of course. But as Alicia Kennedy wrote in her essay On Glamour, for some people, you could make the argument that it really doesn’t. Food is just another conspicuous consumption, a signal of one’s values and aspirations. Or, less cynically, it’s just a source of entertainment and distraction. I also enjoy vicariously living through creators like how.kev.eats as he tries hyped-up foods around the city. That said, I’m still not rushing out to try the suprême croissants at Lafayette Bakery.

Because even if it feels good to check a thing off your list, to have an opinion, to be a part of the zeitgeist, isn’t it still a little disappointing when something is just…not good? When the trending eight-dollar pastry is dried out or overly sweet? When the pizza you waited an hour for is too tough and too salty? Wouldn’t you want instead for that bite to be so delicious, so stunning that the pleasure is not just social but visceral?

People talk about the algorithm as a reductive influence in art, but what about in writing as a public service? Recommending restaurants is, after all, supposed to be a service. Whether you make lists and guides or write beautiful reviews, we’re all in the business of helping diners spend their money conscientiously, effectively. So I’d argue that algorithms are reductive here too. Our feeds may favor volume and voracity, but I’d still prefer to wait for something good, even if that means what I have to say gets lost in the algorithm.

This, I think, is what the professional critics, including myself, are working so diligently and trying very hard to unearth. Originality, deliciousness, value. Good food, and food that is good.

When I find myself on the restaurant recommendation side of Instagram or TikTok, I scroll through mostly for fun (and a little hate-watching if I’m being honest). But I’ll happily pause when I see accounts like Righteous Eats or Nicolas Nuvan. Their story-telling style, as I’ve said before, shows us the human side of restaurants, which you can’t always capture in a traditional review and is much harder to produce than a mere opinion.

With these videos, we get a rare glimpse of the people who have made it their livelihoods to feed New Yorkers. I think the coverage spawns a different kind of appreciation for the craft of hospitality. Even if the food isn’t perfect by certain critical standards, there’s value in supporting the city’s small businesses and finding goodness where it is.

The last thought I’ll leave you with is this: What does it say about the state of things that people are spending so much time, online and offline, looking for mindlessness and corporeal pleasures? That a generation of young, extremely online people are hustling so hard to take control of their working lives and financial futures? At the same time, the cynic in me is asking, are we, the audience, willing to follow just anyone with a knack for CapCut? Something seems amiss. I would be alarmed, but I’m too busy looking for something good to eat.

1. This is not the essay where I address these points as criticisms of Michelin. Maybe soon?